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Bakers Percentage Calculator

Use baker's math to turn ingredient weights into percentages of flour. Supports g, kg, oz, lb, and stone for bread and pizza dough recipes.

Bakers Percentage Calculator



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SIMILAR TOOLS


Last updated: May 1, 2026

Created by: Eon Tools Dev Team

Reviewed by: Radu Vasile


What this does

So you keep seeing bread recipes written in percentages, like 65 percent hydration or 2 percent salt, and you want to work in that language. This calculator does the conversion. You give it an ingredient weight and your total flour weight, and it tells you that ingredient as a percentage of the flour. That is the heart of baker's math, where flour is always the yardstick.

How to use it

  1. Enter the ingredient weight and pick its unit.
  2. Enter the total flour weight and pick its unit.
  3. Press Calculate to see the baker's percentage.

The two units do not have to match. The tool converts both to grams before it works out the percentage.

How the maths works

In baker's percentage, the flour is always 100 percent, and every other ingredient is measured against it. So the calculation is simply:

baker's percentage = (ingredient weight ÷ flour weight) × 100

Say you have 650 grams of water and 1000 grams of flour. That is 650 ÷ 1000 × 100, which is 65 percent. Bakers call the water percentage the hydration, so this dough is at 65 percent hydration. Do the same for salt, yeast, or anything else.

Why bakers use it

Tying everything to flour is a quietly powerful idea. Because the ratios stay the same whatever the batch size, you can scale a recipe up or down without it falling apart, compare two recipes at a glance, and spot when something looks off. A dough at 75 percent hydration will always be wetter than one at 60 percent, no matter how much you are making.

For a sense of the usual numbers, a typical bread runs around 100 percent flour, 60 to 70 percent water, about 2 percent salt, and a small percentage of yeast. Once you read in percentages, a recipe tells you what kind of dough it is before you have weighed a thing.

Questions people ask

What is hydration?

It is just the baker's percentage of the water, the water weight divided by the flour weight. Higher hydration means a wetter, often more open dough.

Why do the percentages add up to more than 100?

Because every ingredient is measured against the flour, not against the total. The flour alone is 100 percent, so once you add water, salt, and the rest, the sum goes well above it. That is normal in baker's math.

Do I include the flour in my sourdough starter?

For an accurate total, yes. Count the flour and water inside your starter or levain as part of the recipe's flour and water when you work out the percentages.

References

  1. King Arthur Baking. Baker's Percentage. https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/pro/reference/bakers-percentage

Radu Vasile

Radu Vasile is a gluten-free food creator from Romania who runs The GF Recipes and has built a global community of more than 100,000 followers across his blog, app, and social platforms. With over six years of experience creating food content, he brings practical knowledge of recipe, nutrition, and food focused utility needs. At Eon Tools, he reviews food tools.

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